Question: How many high-end audio
manufacturers have appeared on the CNBC financial channel? Neil Young touting
Pono did the day after their Kickstarter launch. As much as I have my
not-so-positive opinions of CNBC and their clowns/talking heads, once you know
CNBC's conflict of and self-interests you can gleam a half decent amount of
information from their promotional Wall Street television broadcast. Recently,
Mat Weisfeld of VPI appeared on the far more respected Bloomberg TV not just
once, but twice! That is very impressive
for our humble industry and I applaud Mat for his rewarding efforts at
revitalizing VPI to embrace the modern marketplace. Yet, in total, that is
basically all the high-end audio industry has achieved recently in the eyes of
this investment/consumer to reach a broad mainstream audience in a substantial manner.
Ok, the Audioquest Dragonfly is an exception to some extent.

How many high-end audio companies decided to
showcase their products at the incredibly popular SXSW 2014 to reach mainstream
consumers? And remember these attendees are not just regular Joe Six-Pack types,
but highly technical, business savvy programmers, app start-ups,
forward-thinkers, visionaries... and Venture Capitalists with deep pockets. Even
RollingStone.com announced the successful launch of Pono when it hit a mere
$800,000 in funding within a few hours of their Kickstarter launch. Looking at
Pono's Kickstarter page they are touting magazines including USA Today,
Billboard, Forbes, Newsweek, The Guardian, The New York Times, Huff Post, etc,
yet not a single 'mainstream' high-end mag. Coincidence on Pono's part? I
think not.

As of this writing, only ~60 hours since launch,
Pono has earned over $2,750,000 from their Kickstarter campaign with 32 days
still remaining. Have read various articles from the usual audiophile-type
magazines and writers since Pono's launch three days ago (as of this writing)
and it seems some of them are missing the train. Instead of coming aboard for a
beneficial ride-along and looking at the possibilities, we get the usual
pre-assumed assumptions. Color me not
astonished at some writers willfully wanting to remain on the platform at the
train station.

First, Pono is not just about you. It is not
about me either. Pono is not directly seeking audiophile approval as we are
already sold on the idea. Though as an extension, am sure many true
music lovers will be buying albums from PonoMusic when it goes live
online. So who is Pono marketing to? Pono is for everyone! All the recent
bad-mouthing and speculation by other magazine writers is generally just that,
speculation based on their own personal experiences in their life and knowledge
of the high-end audio marketplace. With such a skewed and narrow vision of the
world it is no wonder they do not fully 'get it'. Fact is many audiophiles
will not fully 'get it' at this time because the PonoPlayer is not in
production and thus no one can make sound quality judgments on the PonoPlayer
and the PonoMusic store is not online to comment on the depth and breathe of
their offerings. Speculation based on expert knowledge is wonderful, but can you
wisely leave emotion at the door and look at Pono from a pure business model
point of view?

One
of the first things I did when first seeing Pono's Kickstarter page was not
to look at the unit specs, not the
price, not even their posted FAQ or the usual promotional blurbs.
What I first looked at was who are the
investors and brains behind this new company. You could have invested
in the best widget within the world, but without the right team doing the right
things in the most advantageous ways in order to make it a success... you may as
well have invented a time portal that goes 15 minutes into the future that no
one knows about. Sure it is a great invention worth millions – trillions
actually if you know how to properly
use it – yet you might never sell a single one because you have no way of
properly presenting and promoting it that resonates with others.

Sure Neil Young is not a youthful hipster living
in one of the newfound Dot Com 2.0 hotbed locations. Heck, Neil probably has
never danced to EDM at a Las Vegas club. Neil knows music, is highly respected by
other musicians, and has an impressive business
team who has his back. During Neil Young's SXSW presentation he
mocked the whole five speaker surround sound setup and how wives' were perhaps
not so accepting of all those speakers in the livingroom. So he is well-aware of
some of the problems faced with getting a product into consumer's home. Neil
is also a visionary who found a way to get financial backing by some serious and
respected business people.

"Pono plays back whatever the artist decided to
do... just like the artist made them (in the recording studio)." Yes we can
argue that some of what Neil Young says is false, or at least a tiny bit
misleading, but it is only because we audiophiles have known certain things for
years. Joe Six-Pack has almost literally no clue about high resolution audio
FLAC files, and who are we as the high-end audio industry to blame for that
fact? Remember that when you point your finger at someone there are three
pointing back at you. To bring a wide variety of music lovers the great news
about Pono, Neil Young is getting major traction with popular and well-respected
musicians and trend-setters to join Pono. When these popular musical artists
start to gain momentum in helping to promote higher resolution audio files to
the masses, we can hope they extend this desire to their home audio equipment.
Because, as I see it, any effort to bring public awareness to the availability of high
resolution audio files over MP3 is a great effort we should all be supporting.
HDtracks could get a boost from Pono due to a broader audience being aware of
the benefits in downloadable high quality music instead of iTunes (and others)
lossy MP3 format, which we all know is worse than the now nearly 30 years old
CD(!). Like John Hamm, CEO and an investor in Pono said, "People swapped quality
for convenience."

MP3 And The 1990's
When the MP3 first appeared online in the early
1990's we were still dealing with 56kBs dial-up modems, small 500MB (half a
single GB!) hard drives... and eventually Windows 95, thick 'candy bar' cell
phones, Netscape introduced SSL and Apple allowed other companies to 'clone'
and sell their Macintosh machines to stores worldwide. For investors, you might
recall the day Netscape went public at an IPO price of $28/share and by closing
it reached $58. The first real 'big deal' in Dot Com IPO'ing! But forget
the past because life moves on, the Sony cassette Walkman is dead, and am sure
you don't want to miss all the fun we modern technology and music lovers enjoy
each day.

Not only can we easily prove via measurement that
modern technology is more productive than that of yesteryear, we can see the
results within our daily lives too. So if we can easily prove that PonoMusic and
HDtracks FLAC files are better than lossy MP3, with sound quality backing up the
technical measurements, then what Neil Young said is true in that "Pono is about
the music... about you hearing what we hear." Anyone who has been in a recording
studio in the past, well, forever, knows how much music is thrown away in the MP3
compression process. Referring to PonoMusic's FLAC files, popular
singer/songwriter Beck said "It's how it's supposed to be heard."

"If we fail, we know that people will realize
something is wrong (with MP3)... if this succeeds everyone wins. Support us,"
said Neil Young. Excellent point Neil as many people have made a small fortune
in the high-end audio industry because they started with a larger one. Yet the
fact will remain that many more people will be aware of the MP3's
shortcomings. Audiophile readers will surely agree that any way to get the
message out to the public is better than no message at all.

Here are two more things Neil Young said during
the SXSW event:

"I want to bring music to where it can be. It is
the 21st century. Why should we be suffering [with MP3] at the hands
of some mega-tech company?"

"In audio there's never been such low quality
[music] and the opportunity for it to be so great."

"Kickstarter and music
enabled us to get where we are" Neil Young said discussing the successful launch
only four hours into their Kickstarter campaign. John Hamm, CEO of PonoMusic
said "The last thing we want to do is start a format war" referring to the FLAC
files they will be selling. "Pono is a simple mission, on the price convenience
curve. We want to bring everyone a simple, easy end-to-end service with the
music at the highest quality." When asked about the PonoPlayer's shape, CEO
John Hamm said "The triangular shape was to be an iconic design. We chose
components for their quality, not their size" He also said "We're building a
company and long-term movement... it is building a huge community."

A Few Words About DSD SupportWhat I find truly interesting is that Pono may be the
very best opportunity to finally bring modern high fidelity recording studio
sound quality to the mainstream consciousness. Many of us have been enjoying
FLAC files for years, but ask people on the street about FLAC and wait for the
blank stare. Ask them about DSD and you'll usually get the same response. Ask
them about lower-than-CD quality MP3 and see what happens. Frankly, Pono does not
need the high-end audio community.
Am sure this will anger some of the self-absorbed types who think they Pown(o)
the industry, yet the fact is we are but a very small, niche' market in the
scheme of life and our broad worldwide consumer-based economy. "Pono is aimed at
the mainstream," said Neil Young. Face it, Beats could care less about
audiophiles and look at their success, so Pono may be moving in that direction
too.

To avoid consumer confusion about high resolution
music file types, and since the PonoPlayer already supports all the major file
types, there is a financial advantage in only supporting PonoMusic's high-rez
FLAC format. Sony's proprietary DSD format could be supported since the
internal DAC can handle it, though as a business decision why support DSD if you
only sell FLAC files? DSD is still unknown by virtually all mainstream
consumers. On the other hand, if there is enough demand for DSD either Pono
could offer support via a firmware update or the hacker community could make it
happen since the PonoPlayer is based on the highly popular Android platform. For
all we know the PonoPlayer will support DSD files when it is released so this
whole debate will be moot.

Side NoteAs a side note, yes you can load your existing FLAC,
MP3, etc files to the PonoPlayer. Thus you can easily load your existing FLAC
music to the PonoPlayer. Apple really did a very bad thing when early on
they choose to use a protected file type to force you into their lossy music
ecosystem. No doubt Apple made this decision to enhance their profit at the
expense of allowing music lovers to freely enjoy their music they paid for.

How To Make A Small FortuneAs many of us in the audiophile community have
realized, you can make a small fortune within our industry provided you start
with a big one. Apologies if that sounds pessimistic, yet looking over the
landscape there are better investments elsewhere that are far more liquid, and
to some extent, relatively predictable with a long-term (historic) lifecycle.
Recently we have purposefully spent funds (notice I didn't say doesn't say
invest) in our Enjoy the Music.TV venture. Dare one mentions that this site was
very close to bankruptcy during our third year online (1998). Later in life came
the reality that, pertaining to investing, there would be zero conflict of
interest. Thus quite a few attractive high fidelity audio business deals that
have crossed my desk all were flatly refused. I'll avoid the usual Audio
and Fi magazine discussion, let
alone the incredibly well-backed financially McLaren trying their hand at
selling high-end audio equipment and how that went. Am sure the investors, who
are the core backers of Pono, also knew the risks and what would be the most
productive way to promote it to ensure the grassroots crowd would spread the
good word (gospel?) about the quality of FLAC music files.

Speaking of the crowd, how many companies have
major leading musical artists actively endorsing their product to their fan
base? Has the high-end audio community admitted we have a track record of being
relatively powerless over our love for music and ability to promote high-end
audio in a meaningful and broad-based way? Are we willing to take the next step
with accepting that perhaps someone outside our direct community could help
restore the discussion about high fidelity versus MP3 back to the masses? And
lastly, will the gatekeepers of the high-end audio industry accept their
personal decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of someone who
can bring this discussion to the forefront?

Pono Gets The Conversation
GoingThe Pono train may be leaving the station, and the
Matrix Trainman does not need the
high-end audio community to ride along. Perhaps we need them more than they need
us? The real question may be "Are we willing to embrace Pono because for the
first time in decades it will
bring the discussion about true
high fidelity music back to the mainstream consciousness." Dare I say this,
Pono could also boost sales of high-end audio products if we play our cards
right. Holding a pair of niche' high-end audio market Audiophile Aces is good,
yet Pono may be a Royal Straight Flush. What hand of cards are you willing to
bet on that have the best odds of #winning the 'hearts and minds' of the
public? When Pono wins, we all win
because it brings the knowledge of higher quality music as
the artists intended – that blows away mainstream lossy MP3 – to
the everyday music lover. You can draw your own conclusion and history will one
day tell the tale. We as a community need to decide if we choose to support and
expand upon the discussion of FLAC over MP3 to further help the Pono movement,
or will the industry get mired down arguing over... and thus pollute,
contaminate – and the joy-killer of them all – confuse millions of music
lovers about our own niche' hobby called high-end audio.

Who would you bet on to bring about more
broad-based consumer awareness concerning high resolution music versus MP3?
Remember what I said during a seminar about a year ago concerning marketing?
Neil Young's message of consumers choosing convenience over sound quality
during the past few decades at the hands of lossy MP3 is true, yet today we have
the technology to finally break the stranglehold provided music lovers are aware
there is a choice. Thus I resonate with Neil's message of enjoying music
as the artists intended and the
Pono initiative. You should too... if you love music.